Internet services have become as essential as water and electricity in the daily lives of the people. When computers first came into existence, they were not very easy to handle. But the curiosity of the commoners to know about their technicality has led them to use these devices conveniently. Earlier, these machines were used for making complicated computations, but with the gradual development in the field of technology, they have become the best platform for enabling people to communicate with each other, in spite of huge distance between their places. Thanks to the emergence of email server SMTP that has made the process of communication so convenient and effective. If you too desire to gain an instant communication experience, availing SMTP service would really be great.

For a regular user who uses Simple Mail Transfer Protocol or SMTP service for emailing purpose, it is enough to be aware of the fact that these facilities enable you to send and receive electronic mails. But some of the people are quite curious to know about the series of steps that the server follows in making the delivery of your email successful. To quench their thirst of acquiring knowledge about the multiple aspects of email server SMTP and also to help the administrators manage the functioning of the server in a proper way, the steps to check and test your server manually has been mentioned within this article.

To be precise, an SMTP session is simply considered as telnet over TCP port 25 rather than port 22. Based on this point, however, the six steps to be followed to test the email server SMTP properly have been mentioned below:

Connect: In order to connect, at the run dialog, you can use your telnet program, where you must ensure specifying the SMTP port. You can specify it as – telnet mailserver.com 25.

Handshake: This is where you need to specify your host's address. In this case, you can type any relevant or irrelevant detail, but if the email server SMTP, with which you are trying to connect has Spam filtering function, it is likely to deny the invalid data.

Identifying the sender: While filtering for Spam, the recipient email server SMTP would surely want that the address you have specified in the FROM text box during handshake should resolve to the same IP as in the domain listed during the above handshake step.

Identifying the recipient: You must keep one thing in mind and that is to start a session with a server specified in these steps. If you specify to start your session with server A and send a message to an address B, it will surely be rejected. However, there are some of the email server SMTP alternatives, which allow this to happen. These are referred as Open Mail Relays that are, normally, blacklisted.

Providing a message body: This is the step that allows you to type relevant keywords and data along with other text messages and then click enter as per the instructions provided by the email server SMTP. The text message format is somewhat like: DATA, followed by subject: then follows sincerely, in the next line the name of the user.

End the session: Typing QUIT will finish your SMTP service session.